1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention describe how a history of recognition result alternatives can be used to improve the performance of a spoken dialog system.
2. Background
There are known spoken computer-dialog systems in which a human caller talks to a computer (e.g., through a telephone or other audio enabled device). In such systems the computer is able to generate speech output, either as synthesized or prerecorded speech or a mixture of the two. The system may further feature an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, which analyzes sound data digitized from a caller's utterances. The ASR engine generates a speech recognition result, which contains an ordered list of alternative interpretations. Each interpretation consists of one or more information items. The speech recognition result is then passed to a dialog manager for further analysis, at the end of which the dialog manager generates a textual output suitable for speech output generation.